“This is the one!” my little girl exclaimed, “This is the candy that stays sour all the way through! Let’s get it! You won’t be able to handle it, your tongue will burn after!”
So I bought her this small candy that they thankfully sold in singles, and I got one for myself too. We chose the color green because from our previous experience of sour candies, those (and sometimes the yellows) were the most merciless.
We left the supermarket and sat on the curb by a fuchsia bougainvillea bush that scattered some of its pink on the asphalt, beautifully contrasting against the freshly painted black and yellow of the sidewalk and against the salted bronze of our slippered feet.
I ventured to act more excited than she was as I tore the wrapper from the candy, to which she rolled her eyes but secretly appreciated.
She held her candy up to mine and said, “Cheers!”
And with our eyes locking that moment in each other – hers wide and round like buttons with plenty of lid space, mine lidless and small like a neem leaf – we each popped a candy into our mouths. Without exchanging any words, in order to keep up with the saliva building up and swirling around our tongues, we knew that we were up for the challenge of ‘no squinting’ all the way through sucking this chemical of a candy.
We were both experts at withstanding the encounter with different types of sour candies. She was very recent and fresh in the feat, while I had bested twenty-five-some years without re-exposing myself to the innocent self-torture.
When the sour candy was almost finished, she bit through it and raised her hands up in the air, the transparent skin in the inside of her arms tautly stretched so that the veins were more visible and looked almost as green as the candy. She squealed, “I did it! I finished it first! I won!”
I had no idea it was a race, I spat out my candy to celebrate her victory and said, “I give up! You win!”
We walked home, our teeth as green as the Hulk’s skin. Our esophagus’ burning and still dripping the stuff of heartburn into our stomachs.
I was astonished at this obsession of hers that surely was mine too, and my sister’s and most of my classmates back in elementary school.
I thought of how little it differed from the way my cousin and I forced ourselves to withstand the nausea and dizziness of smoking our first cigarette on our neighbor’s roof when we were thirteen.
I thought of how similar it was to how my high school best friend and I put a timer of 40 minutes between taking bastardini shots that made us utterly sick in our first semester of college, as if someone was holding a knife to our wrists if we didn’t chug on the spot.
I thought of the obsession of calling a boy’s phone, over and over, tears streaming down my face and frustration constricting my throat, as he rejected each call. All because I was so persistent that this was a shade of true love – this dark, this needful, this despairing frantic anxious shameless desperation.
It’s astonishing. Flabbergasting. How people run outside of themselves, drained and barely standing up, to do things and become things they know are not right. And manage to gather so much pleasure and so much LIFE out of it, until it can’t be anything but right.
The weight of the Cahonies we, the human race, can carry!
What’s even more confounding in all of this is that those who flip themselves inside-out, find themselves outside-in even better, faster, in a more addictively rewarding and wholesome manner.
They become more enjoyable to be around and hang out with.
They don’t just learn how to heal a fracture of a broken thing within them. They actually experience many types of fractures and concoct healing potions, with selective ingredients, to be able to walk better, breathe better, cope better.
They know more of life’s twists and turns. Nothing shocks them to a standstill. They become more lovable.
They withstand the sourness of the candy all the way through, without the relieving sweetness breaking through from its center.
I love those people.
I love them so much and I can’t wait to meet more of those gullible f***s.
Some parts of me hope that my little girl does not end up being one of them.
But more parts of me pray that she does.
In retrospect and overall, all of me asks the almighty universe that if she does, she would bite through the most challenging sourness of life as she did now and say: “I did it! I finished the ordeal! I won!”
And that then, she would come out unmarred, surpassing the outlines of her body to the solar system and all the objects and feelings that orbit it.
Beisan A. Alshafei
Written on November 18, 2020
Beisan's Burble 